Thread by @Pinboard

I think making Facebook the villain, while always fun, takes us past the foundational problem here. Why people are so ready to be radicalized, including into some nonsensical directions like flat earthism, is a bigger question than can fit into a scheme of heroes and villains.

https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1439440378856448000

Part of the answer lies in a radical distrust of existing institutions, which if not born in 2008 certainly crystallized then. Another part of the answer has to do with how social media gives every subculture global reach. Another is in the architecture of persuasion and virality

Most of these are questions of human nature—we are a social species whose biology and culture is set up for life in small and gossipy local groups. Taking the "local" and "small" out of that equation has been a great social experiment enabled by the internet. It's not going well

But to blame Facebook for it also misses the point, because it conflates the company's very real faults with the structural problems of how to live in an interconnected world. This search for villains and scapegoats is a symptom of the very dynamic we're trying to get a handle on

And the people doing the research on this problem are mostly the elites who are so deeply distrusted by the kind of people who find comfort in belief systems like cryptocurrency or QAnon. This gives the whole project a paternalistic and authoritarian air.

As people like @alexstamos have rightly pointed out, this whole cauldron of outrage creates powerful disincentives for the social media giants—the only ones who have the data—to study what is going on. You don't have to worry about subpoenas for research you never conducted.

For people who don't know my work, I've been beating on Facebook like a piñata ever since I was on MySpace. it brings me comfort and happiness. But I also think we need to find a way to step out of the social media thunderdome and find a way to understand and fix this dynamic.

I also think that whatever approach we take from that can't be limited to academics, lawyers, and the various former tech executives who saw the error of their ways and have become the most prominent voices in this field. We can't NPR or social justice our way out of this problem

But the direction this project is going now is to create technical, legal and regulatory tools for power elites to suppress public speech that they find ideologically harmful. And at the same time, they express dismay that alienated people continue to flock to alternate realities

We need some fresh thinking on how to incorporate communication technologies into our social lives in a way that doesn't incentivize anger, radicalize the vulnerable, and turn every issue into tribal war. Nerdesse oblige on the part of the current players is not going to cut it.

And finally, we have to take this discussion out of the American cultural context these companies marinate in. You can't localize the dynamics of social media the way you would translate a web page, by doing an American version first and then tweaking it a bit for the foreigners

A lot of people have been comparing Facebook to big tobacco, but in my view the better metaphor for social media is alcohol. Unrestricted it's a disaster, but most of the work of keeping it in check is done by social norms, and differs across cultures. Some do better than others.

While we wait, though, letting a bunch of pasty nerds continue to run this apparatus of influence for profit is no bueno. Let's at least demonetize it (by cutting away at the taproot of surveillance and data collection) while we figure out how to live with it long term.

All that said about the futility of prescriptive content policing, I still believe people should do thirty years without parole for posting any recipe that doesn't start with the ingredient list and continue immediately with a straightforward description of how to make the dish.